Only one Fastly customer caused the general internet downturn on Tuesday

The cloud company apologized, said such a mistake had to be foreseen and promised to clarify what happened

Photo: Dean Mouhtaropoulos / Getty Images Many have wondered what it was like A generalized internet down on Tuesday was possible, when dozens of major sites around the world remained unreachable for just under an hour. The outage affected some popular websites like Amazon, Reddit and Twitch, as well as big media websites like the Guardian and the New York Times.

Almost live it was known that the problem was attributable to Fastly, a cloud services company that many sites rely on. Now, however, Fastly herself has explained what caused the incident that sent the web pages offline. The disruption was due to a single customer of the company, who allegedly changed their configurations, accidentally blowing half the internet.

Fastly solved the problem and brought all the "fallen" sites back online in a relatively short time , but she apologized and said an incident like this should have been expected. Fastly Vice President Nick Rockwell wrote in a blog post on the company, "This disruption has been large and serious and we are truly sorry for the impact on our customers and all those who rely on them."

On Tuesday, a customer of Fastly, who has not been named, by changing his internet connection settings exposed a bug in a software update released in mid-May to almost the entire Fastly network. 85% of the company's customer network started reporting errors.

Engineers identified the cause of the problem about 40 minutes after the sites went offline, around 12pm. "In 49 minutes, 95% of our network was functioning normally," the company said. Fastly made a bug fix across its network and promised in the near future to shed more light on the processes followed during the incident and why the bug was not detected in previous tests.

Together with companies like Cloudflare and Akami, Fastly is one of the so-called "content distribution network" (CDN) giants that govern large swathes of the Internet by storing customer data within its own clouds. This system allows the content to get to our browser faster, but it also means that more people can access that content at the same time.

Tuesday's disservice renewed concerns that a network increasingly run by a few subjects is ultimately less secure and exposed to problems of this type.


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